Bioluminopedia

I considered doing something similar to this when i was doing my arts degree. Ended up growing several bacterial cultures from my class mates finger tips instead.  Wish I had access to the kind of resourse these guys were lucky enough to enjoy. But truly both the art team and the science team have colaborated well together to make this happen and i might say the artists did a great job working with an art medium that they most likly would not have been very familiar with and still managed to pull the whole thing together is a testiment to the creative spirit.

I can just imagin what it may have been like to be in that dark gallery.  To walk into a darkened room with the expectations of gazing upon a glowing bio light source must have been pretty cool. It would take a while for your eyes to adjust I imagine, maybe a few minuts to begine to make out the light source, then perhaps several minutes to fully begin to appreciate the beauty of the luminaries behind their little culture dishes on the walls.

Im quite impressed how some of the compositions seem to appear like drops of water others, tribal design in nature and the arched window says a lot to me about the awe that stain glass can give to a cathedral.  The bio luminescent bacteria that the artists were mucking about with here are relatively harmless "vibrio phosphereum" living symbiotically on several marine organisms and is harnessed by these animals for a range of uses including lures, flash lights, even as a camouflage tactic with some squide speacies where they use the blue glow to more closely match the blue of the sky abouve them so when swimming above a predator their silhouette is cancelled out and so go unnoticed.

BIOGLYPHS is an art and science collaboration initiated in 2002 by members of the Center for Biofilm Engineering and the Montana State University School of Art. Two BIOGLYPHS exhibitions of living bioluminescent paintings were created by teams of student and staff artists, scientists and engineers in 2002.

BIOGLYPHS was an interdisciplinary, interspecies exhibition—the first of its kind at Montana State University–Bozeman.  The show opened on Earth Day, Monday, April 22, 2002, and continued through Friday, April 26, at the Exit Gallery of MSU–Bozeman's Strand Union Building.

Background.

Over a period of two months in the spring of 2002, students and faculty from the MSU School of Art met with students, staff and faculty at the Center for Biofilm Engineering to explore the possibility of working as partners in a creative project that would bridge science and art. Those early conversations led to the decision to enlist a third party of collaborators: bioluminescent bacteria from the ocean.

Meetings were subsequently held in a CBE lab to introduce the School of Art participants to laboratory equipment and techniques, and to the practice of "painting" on prepared petri dishes with a sort of "invisible ink" composed of liquid medium inoculated with the bacteria. Then the microorganisms themselves went to work, multiplying on the plates and beginning to produce light within 24 hours.

The result of this 3-way collaboration was a collection of bioluminescent paintings. In the darkened gallery, the only light available to view the art was that produced by the bacteria themselves. Over the five-day period, the light intensity of the paintings changed as the bacteria multiplied and then gradually consumed the nutrient available.